What no one can ever adequately explain to me is given we pay for this capital investment with higher prices anyway is why those prices would not be lower if a profit was not being taken.

If people really do believe privatised companies are more efficient than nationalised ones why not run them along the exact same lines but minus the shareholders and use the profit to keep the prices down?

The idea we need these companies as they are because our pensions invest in them is a no reason for privatisation either. Our pension funds would simply invest in something else.

And indeed, in the case of the train companies, the government (so us, in effect) pays for new rolling stock for the private rail companies – and then pays the private rail companies a subsidy to run it.

Or, how about one of Branson's greatest wheezes?
He persuaded the fat controller that the West Coast line needed to be upgraded for his new trains to run on it.
This was agreed and we (yes we) paid for it to be upgraded.
But the upgrade caused disruption and ... you've guessed it ... Virgin were compensated for the consequent delays to their trains.
All the while receiving eye-watering subsidies to run the trains in the first place.

East Coast trains (used to be National Express and before that was GNER) is nowadays owned by the Dept of Transport.
And it's around 50 quid cheaper to go from Leeds to London (open return) via publicly-owned East Coast than it is from Manchester to London via the efficient and privatised West Coast mainline.

Now remind me again why privatisation was such a great idea?

"Efficiency" is one of those vague words that are often thrown into debate to mislead. People have strived to make the best use of their time since the dawn of man. Indeed, you could argue that it is one of the reasons human beings as a species have been so successful. That said, the modern Cult of Efficiency (which arose around the turn of the last century with the introduction of huge assembly lines and megafactories) is something more than a simple equation of economics. It's [iideological[/i and defined by its own peculiar set of metrics which should be understood more by what is[i left out of the equation[/i than vice versa. So, a police department can be said to be more "efficient" by cutting 20% of its workforce. But the equation says nothing about the costs that are now transferred over to the public.

It's the same with buses. The first thing a company does after privatisation is cut loss-making routes. The metrics say it is now more "efficient" whilst staying completely silent over people left stuck in a dangerous city past 11:00pm.

Accepting all the points made above about privatisation. Might I offer an explaination as to why prices have gone up so much.

The processing of clean, potable water requires a phenomenal quantity of energy. IIRC Thames Water are the largest consumer of electricity in the Thames Valley and given the large increases in wholesale energy prices, an increase in water bills when the 5 year deal was renegotiated was inevitable. I know for a fact that water companies invest substantially in reducing their energy consumption and this in some respect is offsetting the increase compared to that for electrical power.

We could get started on the privatisation of the power industry now...

These water companies who own all of the water courses in the country and spend so much money on electricity making clean water for me to put in my pond - couldn't they make their own electricity, for free, you know, from the water courses they own ?

Sadly there isn't enough motive power in the UK's watercourse to generate the energy required to purify our water. There are other things the water company are doing

[urlhttp://www.thameswater.co.uk/cps/rde/xchg/corp/hs.xsl/9849.htm#[/url

It's a good old fashioned 'where there's muck there's brass' story.

From memory it was so the government could put the money of the sell-offs into their country's coffers for the benefit of us all. And provide competition that would help keep the costs of the products down. For the benefit of us all.

Is that not the case? [size=85(I'm guessing I'd use the sarcasm emoticon here, but can't find it).[/size



I just realised from schoolboy german where the word Koffer may come from.

Fair point. McLF. Watched a programme on BBC Knowledge over here the other day about wave technology and how brilliant it is.

I've always been of the opinion that necessity company's should be nationally owned, utilities, public transport, farming industry.

The only worry i have with those though is instead of the private companies ripping us off to pay their shareholders and cream off a tidy pay for their directors is the unions holding us by the baby factories whenever they want a way over inflation pay rate and then threatening strikes when they don't paid way more than they worth, <cough> tube workers <cough>
The only thing i like about that is the little man ripping me off is easier to take than the already rich.

I have often wondered about this. For example, having some idea of the tremendous weight that water has, and having watched rivers eg the Aire in spate at Saltaire, I often think of just how much power there must be passing by per second. So multiply that by the UK, and whichever way you look at it, it must surely be a monumental untapped (sorry!) resource.

But how much motive power is there? I am no scientist, nor mathematician but somebody must have worked it out, in order to say there isn't enough motive power. I am not disputing that answer, but the fact there isn't enough ain't the point, why don't we tap into this free resource more than we do?

Anyway some of you who do maths may be able to help. On the back of my fag packet it says that average rainfall is broadly speaking 1 litre; the approx area of the UK is 250,000 sq km; I have no clue what the average height above sea level is, but if it was for the sake of argument 10m, then on average, wouldn't the annual motive power nominally available be the amount it would take to raise that volume of water to that height? And what would that figure be?